Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

by Rebecca Traister

This book also aims to show how this anger—so instrumental to the nation’s growth and progress—has never been celebrated, rarely even been noted in mainstream culture; how women are not lauded for their fury, and too often have had their righteous passions simply erased from the record. We aren’t taught that Rosa Parks, the perfectly demure woman whose refusal to give up her seat kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, was a fervent antirape activist who had once told a would-be attacker that she’d rather die than be raped by him and who, at ten years old, threatened by a white boy, picked up a piece of brick and drew it back to strike him if he approached. “I was angry,” she’d later say of that youthful act of resistance. “He went his way without further comment.”7 We are never forced to consider that rage—and not just stoicism, sadness, or strength—were behind the actions of the few women’s heroes we’re ever taught about in school, from Harriet Tubman to Susan B. Anthony. Instead, we are regularly fed and we regularly ingest cultural messages that suggest that women’s rage is irrational, dangerous, or laughable.